In September 2004, with Hurricane Ivan's damage still everywhere around Mobile, Alabama, a drifter calling himself John Paul Chapman took construction work with Mark and Kim Bentley in Turnerville, near Satsuma, and a bed in their trailer. Searching a closet for batteries and a radio, he found a .25 caliber handgun and kept it, saying he needed protection from looters. On September 17, with the Bentleys' household out for the evening, he took the gun and some cans of Bud Light to the house of a neighbor, Lisa Marie Nichols, forty-three, whom he had heard say she lived alone. He broke in, raped her at gunpoint and shot her three times. Then he went back for a can of gasoline, put her body in the bathtub and set it on fire. That night Mark Bentley smelled gasoline and found him with four cans of it. The next day Nichols's daughters and son-in-law found her remains.
He fled on September 19. The police found three .25 caliber bullets in a wall, matched them to the Bentleys' gun, and lifted his fingerprints from an empty beer can. He was arrested in Mobile early on September 21. Missouri authorities reported that the suspect's birth date and Social Security number belonged to a man serving time in one of their prisons; the real John Paul Chapman's mother admitted she had sold her son's identity to a man named Jeremy Bryan Jones, and fingerprints from a 1990 arrest in Miami, Oklahoma, confirmed it.
Jones was born on April 12, 1973, in Miami, Oklahoma. He was aggressive from boyhood, drank and used drugs by the late 1980s, and was expelled from two high schools. In 1992 he was living in Baxter Springs, Kansas, with a high school friend, Justin Judd. On May 9 Judd married Jennifer, and two days later an intruder tied her up and stabbed her to death. Jones was questioned and released. Through the 1990s came arrests for rape and methamphetamine, a prison term at Hominy, Oklahoma, and in 1997 probation with orders to see a psychiatrist and give DNA samples, which he ignored. In 2000, wanted again, he moved to Joplin, Missouri, persuaded a woman to sell him her imprisoned son's papers for fifty dollars, and became John Paul Chapman. A glitch in the national fingerprint system in 2003 let the false name stand.
In custody he changed his account of Nichols's death again and again: that she died of a drug reaction and he shot her in panic, that he could not complete the rape and shot her, that the gun went off by accident. His former roommate in Douglasville, Georgia, Vicki Freeman, told investigators she believed he had killed their sixteen-year-old neighbor, Amanda Greenwell, who went missing on March 12, 2004, and was found strangled and stabbed. He did not admit that killing. Instead he confessed to some twenty others over twelve years, among them Jennifer Judd and a 1996 double killing in a trailer in Delaware County, Oklahoma, though he could not name many of the victims. He later recanted, and the credibility of several of the confessions has been doubted.
He was convicted of the capital murder of Lisa Nichols and sentenced to death in 2005. He has never been charged with any other killing, and he remains on Alabama's death row.